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Famed for its gardens and ziggurats, the ancient city of Babylon is now little but dust in the Iraqi desert. We discovered the fate of this fabled city by using a variety of methods. We combined searches on "ancient city of Babylon" and "Babylon Iraq" with visits to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Tower
of Babel categories in the Yahoo! Directory. We also stopped by Yahoo! Reference for a helpful overview. Babylon was perhaps the first big city in the world, dating to the third millennium BC. It stood by the Euphrates River on an important trade route. Various dynasties ruled the city-state as it grew to govern much of ancient Mesopotamia. Hammurabi was one noted ruler of the city, and established the Code of Hammurabi. This is the earliest known example of a code of laws publicly announced from a ruler to his subjects. The city was destroyed in 689 BC and rebuilt to achieve
its greatest size glory under the ruler Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 538 BC. He is credited with building the hanging gardens, named by contemporaries as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. These dramatic terraced gardens were kept green and thriving by a complex irrigation system. In 330 BC, Alexander the Great captured Babylon, planning to make it the capital of his empire. But he died soon after taking the city, and his successors built a new capital called Seleucia on the Tigris River. Most of Babylon's population moved to Seleucia, and Babylon withered and practically disappeared by the seventh century AD. Babylon's ruins are near the modern city of Al
Hillah and about 55 miles south of Iraq's capital of Baghdad. Much of the ancient site has been looted, and only fragments of some building foundations remain. Victorian archeologists excavated some of Babylon's treasures, and those can only be seen in German, French, and British museums. The enormous and elaborate Ishtar Gate from the sixth century BC is in Berlin; Iraq has called for its return. Between 1982 and 1989, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered Babylon's walls rebuilt in the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar II. Hussein also built one of his own grand palaces near the site. Today, the baked-mud bricks are about all that's left of Babylon's ancient grandeur.
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